Implement your Social Media Strategy – Part 1

Use Social Media to your Advantage

Earlier on we talked about the SIDA principle and developingkiller Social Media Strategies. Now we take it a step further and actually implement said tactics. There are quite a few things you should keep in mind while doing so.

After you've learned all the techniques and have established your profile in various websites, it’s time to broadcast yourself in the best possible way and reach out to a large audience.

Techniques to extract the maximum out of Social Media

Don’t advertise on your own

Always make sure that you are not the only one in a specific group. Look for other players (even competitors are ok) from the same background or category – This makes it much easier for you to get yourself out there and for other users to hear about you. Post article on platforms like EzineArticles or Alltop and make people talk about you.

Use budURL

Apart from shortening you URL, this tool keeps a complete track of your visitors on social networks, emails, print marketing materials, presentations, etc. It gives you a realistic idea of the total traffic and shows you which approach is working an which is not.

Don’t just collect followers – Build relationships

Just posting information is not enough and doesn’t do much for you or your brand. You need to find a way to encourage visitors to involve themselves, participate and spread the news. Talk to your visitors, ask them about their opinions and take them seriously, ask for feedbacks and you will realize what effect your posting has on your brand.

Blog effectively

Do not restrict your information to just your blog and strive to reach out to a bigger audience. Use sites like ping.fm and track your statistics via budURL as well. There are many other options: pingvine.com for example enables your blogs RSS feed to automatically update ping.fm, resulting in less work for you.

Measuring the Immeasurable

The most challenging task for Social Media Strategists is to convince Businesses on their ROI from Social Media Campaigns. Most of the activities of Social Media have at first a non-financial impact such as:

- Website Visitors                                                                            

- Impressions

- Customer Complaints                                                                 

- Positive Press

- YouTube views                                                                               

- Re-Tweets

- Positive Word-Of-Mouth                                                          

- Facebook Friends, Followers and/or Fans

- Social Mentions                                                                             

- Comments on Blog and Articles

- Delivered E-Mails                                                                         

- Brand Recognition

It is necessary to recognize these activities as part of an indirect Return on Investment and plug these activities by charting baseline metrics before the launch of your campaign.

The frequency, yield and reach will showcase the ROI through increased sales, transactions, enquiries, leads generation and so on.

Wanna know more? Check out Part 2 of this posting or visit our website.